Last call for phone booths

IN THE SUMMER OF 1999, the Holy Spirit directed Rick Karr, a 51-year-old Texan, to answer the calls made to a phone booth located in the middle of the Mojave Desert, 15 miles from a highway. He spent 32 days camping beside the phone booth on the desert playa in scorching heat. During that time he answered over 500 calls, many of which came from someone named Sergeant Zeno, who said he was phoning from the Pentagon.

What was there was only a ghost of what had been there, a phone booth installed in the 1960s for volcanic cinder miners and the few other domestic residents of the area. By the time Rick Karr arrived, the glass casing had been shattered, and what remained of the interior was lined with candles, license plates, rosaries, and other votives.